March 25, 2026 After three surgeries in the last 7 years, including hip replacements on both sides, my legs are not as strong or durable as I’d like them to be. In a lot of ways, I’m strong for my gender, age and size. I grew up on and worked on a family dairy farm back when smaller, hand-carried hay bails were the norm, and I’ve pursued various sports and fitness activities off and on throughout my life, so I’ve been relatively strong most of my life if you take my hips out of the equation. Because my lower body is relatively weak and my upper body is relatively strong, I thoroughly enjoy upper body exercises, and I seriously detest lower body exercises. While there are a few factors that contribute to my loathing, one of them is that lower body exercises are just plain hard for me. I think it’s human nature to seek the path of least resistance, the easy way. I’m very, very human. I don’t find upper body exercises to be as taxing as lower body exercises, so I prefer them. When I’m choosing what I want to do in the gym, like the one day each week I take to just have fun in the gym and not follow a program, any exercise with “squat” in the name is not making the list. I avoid the thing that would probably benefit me the most – strengthening my problem spots – because it’s hard and it hurts. I was thinking about that one day when it occurred to me that I do it in my spiritual life, too. It’s especially evident this Lent. What did I choose to focus on this Lent? A relatively insignificant bad habit. What did I not choose to focus on this Lent? My pride, my anger, my struggles to surrender my will and put God’s will in its place. Like those upper body exercises, tackling a bad habit still takes work. It’s not always easy. Tackling my pride, anger and struggles to surrender, though, is much, much harder. Again, I avoid the things that would probably benefit me most because earnestly and honestly asking God for the grace to tackle them would be hard and accepting that grace and dying to myself may hurt in some ways. I think God is calling me to look more at the hard things for the remainder of this Lent and into Holy Week. He’s calling me – all of us, really – to be stronger and more durable in Him. |
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